THAT’S LIFE

Six lessons from its box-office bellyflop

You couldn’t blame anyone involved in Life Itself for putting money or sweat equity into the project. The sprawling family drama was the work of writerdirector Dan Fogelman, who has one of the biggest hits in contemporary broadcast television with This Is Us. If even 10 per cent of the audience for an average episode last season came out to buy a ticket for his movie on opening weekend, it would have performed solidly, opening above $15 million.

Alas, the film tallied just $2.1 million. Though it starred beloved actors like Oscar Isaac and Annette Bening, it had the worst opening of any film this year on 2,600-plus screens. The Amazon release didn’t even finish in the box office top 10 for the weekend. There are some lessons, grim as they are, to be gleaned from its galumphing. Here are six.

1 Amazon’s got some figuring out to do.

OK, so the two Joaquin Phoenix movies, You Were Never Really Here and Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, were arthouse plays. And Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel was probably never going to blow the doors off the box office even if the movie didn’t come out as Hollywood’s #MeToo scandals were cresting, which it did. But this Amazon Studios release came with fewer built-in excuses.

Now that it has flopped, it means the four movies the company has released as solo distribution ventures have all been duds, none grossing more than $3 million thus far; only earlier films such as The Big Sick and Manchester by the Sea, when it partnered with a veteran distributor, did well at the box office.

2 Maybe pricey acquisitions aren’t such a good idea?

Amazon bought Life Itself for at least $10 million. That’s generally thought of as a sound investment given how much it actually costs to make a movie. Then you start doing the math. Studios collect about half of domestic receipts. So even if Life Itself gets up to $10 million domestically (it won’t) that means only

$5 million in Amazon’s pocket. And that’s before deducting TV and other advertising costs. Those big buys at Sundance are riskier than we thought.

3 Something about the big canvas of TV doesn’t lend itself to the big screen of film.

Maybe it’s that the one-off structure can’t contain all those overspilling plot points, but when was the last time a great TV creator jumped straight to film and directed a hit?

David Chase of The Sopranos disproved his title with Not Fade Away, a rock ’n’ roll coming-ofage story that garnered less than $1 million at the domestic box office.

4 Epic dramas with interlocking storylines don’t work.

I mean, it’s not like they fundamentally can’t work — back in the 2000s there was Babel and Crash. But then came duds like Hereafter and Third Person. And after Cloud Atlas, one of the most expensive attempts ever at the genre, cratered hard, the genre should give any studio or investor pause.

5 Why go wide?

It’s not like it didn’t have a pedigree — the script for Life Itself was on the Hollywood Black List for vaunted screenplays. And Fogelman wrote Crazy, Stupid, Love, that 2011 summer comedy breakout with Ryan Gosling and Steve Carell. But even with all that, should Life Itself, at heart a human drama, really have gone wide on more than 2,600 screens its first weekend? Or should it have platformed, going to a handful of theatres and then rolled out slowly, driven by word of mouth?

The problem is you need critics for word of mouth. And critics savaged Life Itself — it earned just a 12 per cent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

6 Speaking of critics, it probably wasn’t a great idea for Fogelman to attack those evaluating his movie. As the film was rolling out, the director gave an interview to the website TooFab.

“There’s a disconnect between something that is happening between our primarily white male critics who don’t like anything that has any emotion. I don’t feel that often now our pop and film critics are speaking for a sophisticated audience anymore,” he said.

Many female critics quickly piped in to point out this wasn’t a gender thing — they didn’t like the film either. Most of those dismissive reviews were coming anyway, so it’s not as if Fogelman prompted them with his slam. Still, even after a partial walkback, it probably won’t bode well for reviews of his next film attempt.

VVS FILMS There were many reasons that the Dan Fogelman drama Life Itself — which had a handful of stars including Olivia Cooke, left, as Dylan and Mandy Patinkin, as Irwin — should have done well at the box office, but the film was a “giant letdown” for moviegoers and critics alike.